For too many people, their care plans are designed without fully accounting for who they are, the lives they live, what matters to them or what they aspire to achieve. In other words, these care plans are designed for ‘patients like this’ rather than for ‘this patient’. To improve this situation, investigators often propose interventions, such as patient decision aids or patient-reported experience measures, which may disrupt clinical practice and increase the work patients must do. These interventions ‘target’ patients, or rather the images, biomarkers, or numbers that represent their disease, rather than the person behind their patient role. Success becomes getting patients to use the interventions or to report high experience scores as they become overwhelmed by the work of accessing and using healthcare while completing self-care tasks